Our Fave Recent Vids ft. Bonobo, Jarrow, Sleaford Mods & More

It’s not even February, and 2017 is looking to be as musically rich as the last, with a heap of releases, announcements and videos already in our laps. Here’s four of our favourite videos from the year thus far.

Bonobo ft. Nick Murphy – No Reason

More surrealist art film than music video, the new clip from Bonobo is a bit of a trip. The music video comes following last Friday’s release of Bonobo’s sixth album Migration and sees him collaborating with longtime pal Nick Murphy (formerly known as Chet Faker). Directed by award winner Oscar Hudson, the short film takes influence from distorted realities such as in Alice in Wonderland. Filmed entirely in real life, the character growing inside a Japanese house as everything else seems to warp throughout the course of the clip, representing the theme of relationships and the ephemeral.

Jarrow – Mutual Feelings

Mutual Feelings is the third single off Melbourne musician Jarrow’s (Dan Oke) debut album and he’s just released the music video to go with it. Speaking on the song, he said that “Mutual Feelings was written after a chance encounter with a particularly eccentric woman in a psychology class I had a few years ago. I wanted to capture the immediacy and energy of the song with an upbeat and colourful video to match, so I turned to my film making buddy Max Wood for help. This was our first collaboration together.” What better place than the vibrant, inner-city suburb of Footscray to shoot such a video in? There are mirror images of iconic Footscray landmarks spliced throughout, providing a (perhaps surprising to some) beautiful urban landscape turned into psychedelic backdrop for Dan to play against.

Timber Timbre – Sewer Blues

The first single off their upcoming fourth single, Timber Timbre’s Sewer Blues calls to mind Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds almost instantaneously. A hazy, dystopian mesh of melodic spoken word and fuzzed out synthesisers set against a heavy beat, the song is commanding and visual at once. The clip they’ve released to go along with it carries on in a similar vein: all out of focus and black and white. It’s the kind of clip that lingers once it’s over, an echo of modern gothic in bleak, almost dystopian, moment in global political history.

Sleaford Mods – BHS

The first single from their upcoming album, English Tapas, BHS is Sleaford Mods’ unapologetic reminder of their ethics and politics and the video, while comical, plays on it even further. The duo rally against the 1%, voicing their support for those who are denied human and civil rights as well as the unfair distribution of wealth in the modern world. In both song and visuals, BHS details the demise of British Home Stores (BHS) was a chain of department stores in the UK controlled by Sir Philip Green. While the stores under BHS control closed, 11,000 jobs were lost and 22,000 former employees without retirement income, Green had taken £400 million in dividends and was sailing the Mediterranean on a newly-purchased super-yacht. The video, shot fittingly on a yacht, paints Green as a greying, greasy fat-cat rolling in the money he ripped off from the workers who lost their jobs. It’s funny, until you realise that it was in fact, a very real event and the kind of thing that happens all too frequently.